Any experienced programmer knows that reinventing the wheel is probably the most unproductive use of time one can spend on. That’s the main reason why almost all of them spend a great part of their work time searching for code snippets, tutorials and other somehow useful problem solving information. Sometime they find what they were looking for, but most of the time they tend to stumble upon on information which is not useful in that particular moment, but it’s definitely worth saving for a time in the future when that particular algorithm could come in hand.

With so much information at their hands they always come across the problem of storing and correctly cataloging the data. Should they download the data locally and try to organize it by them self? Or should they use an online service like del.icio.us and store only the bookmarks? BTW, that’s what I was doing until recently.

Fortunately, now there is a great peace of software, and whats even better it’s a Firefox addon! It’s called “Zotero” (http://www.zotero.org). At the time of the writing of this text, Zotero had version 1.5 beta. This is what the developers are saying about their software:

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself.

Their slogan is: “Citation management is only the beginning”. And yes, indeed it is only the beginning! Even that the primary use of Zotero is collecting, storing and cataloging citations from around the web and the primary target group which should use it are the students and professionals doing research studies, I am personally using it to simplify my everyday programming life.

Whenever I stumble upon an information (page on a web site, PDF file, an archive file, video tutorial or any kind of document) which I tend to think that it could be useful in the future, I just click on the “Take snapshot of the current page” button and the desired document is instantly downloaded to the local SQLite database which this software is using.

But that is not all. The moment the document is downloaded it’s instantly indexed and then the Zotero’s full-text search engine can easily roam trough it’s data. At Zotero’s web page, they even claim that the PDF files are also indexed for a full text search. But if you think you’ve seen it all, just wait for the next thing in line. The next feature is probably what I most like about this software.

Suppose you’ve found a tutorial, or an online book. They often tend to give code archived in one or several files. What you would normally do is save a snapshot of the web page and then right-click each link to the document of your interest and choose the “Save a link as Zotero snapshot” option from the pop-up menu.

Then, just open the Zotero window and relate the downloaded file to one of the previously taken page snapshots. Now, the two documents are bind together and they are both a click away even when you don’t have Internet connection.

One more thing worth mentioning is that you can make annotations using this software, and you can annotate almost anything. Especially useful feature when you want to mark or comment a piece of a web page information you’ve found as you would put a sticky note in the book you are doing research on.

One more exciting feature, hopefully for the near future is the development of the data synchronization with the Zotero server. This is a feature which is not yet available, but will give you the option to have different copies of Zotero on several locations and be able to sync data between each other. You currently do have the export/import option in this version of Zotero at your disposal, but saving and reading large (and always getting only larger) quantities of data on USB stick whenever you leave work or home tends to get tedious over time.

All in all, this is a great peace of software with even greater future in front of it. If you tend to surf the web as I do and always build libraries of the collected data, I am recommending Zotero with all my heart. It will make your life easier by never letting the relevant data leave your browser window ever again!